Bulgarian Border Police Accused of Abusing Refugees

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Workers expanding a border fence on the outskirts of the small Bulgarian village of Lesovo this month. Refugees have reported being beaten and robbed by Bulgarian border guards while crossing from Turkey.CreditMauricio Lima for The New York Times

SUKRUPASA, Turkey — The small squat structure, a cross between a kiosk and a duck blind, was starkly pale against the brown, soggy hillside a few hundred yards away.

“Bulgarian border police,” said Hasan Bulgur, 73, pointing as he leaned on a crooked walking stick at the edge of this village in northern Turkey. “They are watching us now. When the refugees try to cross, they are stopping them and pushing them back, sometimes beating them, robbing them, even unleashing dogs on them.”

Groups of migrants, having failed to make it past the Bulgarians, frequently straggle out of the fields here, sopping wet after fording a nearby river. They arrive sometimes in groups of as many as 50, some of them with bruised skulls and bashed noses, Mr. Bulgur and other residents said.

“They hit me and took my money,” said Alan Murad, a 17-year-old Iraqi asylum-seeker living at a refugee center in Sofia, Bulgaria’s capital, recounting his treatment by the Bulgarian border authorities. “I ran away from hell at home, trying to find paradise in Europe. Instead, I found another hell.”

One of the puzzles of Europe’s stubborn migrant crisis is why refugees choose to make the perilous and sometimes fatal sea crossing from Turkey to Greece rather than walking across a seemingly accessible land border from Turkey into southern Bulgaria.

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Osman Aran, left, and a friend in the Turkish village of Sukrupasa near the Bulgarian border. “The migrants usually cross over at night, directed by the smugglers," said Mr. Aran, 81, who has lived in Sukrupasa his entire life. "And then we see them straggling back in the morning."CreditMauricio Lima for The New York Times

Officials and the migrants themselves point to several reasons. The sea route is cheaper and more favored by human smugglers. The border, so inviting on the map, is a tougher obstacle than it may appear, especially in winter, made up of fast rivers, thick woods and jagged hills. And new razor fences and high-tech monitoring gear have made it significantly more difficult to sneak across.

But the leading reason, many refugees interviewed in Turkey and across the Balkans said, is the ruthlessness of the Bulgarian border agencies.

Interviews with aid workers and dozens of refugees making their way across a half-dozen countries revealed a widespread fear of the Bulgarian authorities. They talked of rough or violent behavior by border guards, who will register and fingerprint the migrants — meaning they have to stay in Bulgaria while their cases are adjudicated — or push them back into Turkey.

The Bulgarian government, which like its counterparts in many other Central and Eastern European capitals has been far less welcoming of refugees than those in most of Western Europe, dismissed suggestions of systemic efforts to intimidate refugees.

“I think these charges are widely exaggerated,” said Philip Gounev, a deputy interior minister in Bulgaria. “Our policy has always been to investigate such cases, if there is a complaint. Yet out of 30,000 people who have passed through the border, we’ve had only two complaints that resulted in prosecutions. We can’t do an investigation if they don’t give us a signal.”

But to the 80 residents of Sukrupasa, one of a string of Turkish villages overlooking the Bulgarian border, the sight of returning migrants has become a common one, especially here where there is not yet a razor-wire border fence being built by Bulgaria.

“The migrants usually cross over at night, directed by the smugglers,” said Osman Aran, 81, who has lived in Sukrupasa his entire life. “And then we see them straggling back in the morning.”

Based on the stories he has heard from migrants and villagers, Krassimir Kanev, chairman of the Bulgarian Helsinki Committee, said he believed the abuse of migrants was quite widespread, but it is impossible to tell for certain.

A report released last month by Oxfam and the Belgrade Center for Human Rights drew on interviews with 110 refugees who had passed through Bulgaria and into Serbia. Each one who had contact with the Bulgarian police reported some form of abuse, the report said, an outcome so unanimous that even other aid groups found it a little suspect.

Complicating matters, Mr. Kanev said, is that some of the smugglers tell the migrants to complain about such abuse, whether real or not.

Under European immigration rules, asylum seekers who are registered and fingerprinted in one country are expected to remain in that country until their case is decided. If they continue to another country, they could be arrested and returned.

“The traffickers tell them that if they complain about abuse by Bulgarian police and then continue on to Germany, they stand a better chance of not being returned to Bulgaria,” Mr. Kanev said. “They have an incentive to lie.”

But stories of abuse are so widespread that attention must be paid to them, refugee groups say.

“We have tried to raise our concerns with the Bulgarian authorities and sometimes directly with the police,” said Babar Baloch, a spokesman for the United Nations high commissioner for refugees, who was part of a recent delegation touring refugee centers in Bulgaria. “They come back and tell us that if there is credible evidence, they will act against those who are responsible.”

The temperatures are plummeting now, and the surge of people into Europe is slowing. Sea crossings to the Greek islands are down to an average of fewer than 3,000 people a day, less than a third of the traffic seen earlier in the fall. Some days, when the weather is especially bad or the Turkish authorities particularly vigilant, there are none.

And while Bulgaria has had about 10,000 arrivals this year — not counting those who were pushed back at the border — those numbers remained fairly flat through the fall and are showing signs of diminishing to more normal winter levels.

“Nearly three months ago, we had thousands of refugees coming to Edirne,” said Dursun Ali Sahin, the governor of Edirne Province in Turkey. “But today, we have only 180 refugees living in our guest quarters.”

Part of the reason is that the Turkish authorities have tightened their borders, reducing the flows into Greece and Bulgaria. Those who are caught are shipped back to Istanbul or scattered around the country.

All but a few miles of the 125-mile border between Turkey and Greece is a fast-moving river, with the balance blocked by a razor-wire fence.

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A villager with his flock of sheep on the outskirts of Sukrupasa, among the thick woods that help make it tough to cross into Bulgaria.CreditMauricio Lima for The New York Times

The western portions of the 170-mile Bulgaria-Turkey border are also fenced off and, at its eastern edge, the border is the Rezovo River, difficult to cross.

For the moment, though, there is no fence near Sukrupasa, residents say, just Bulgarian police outposts every 50 to 100 yards along the border, which is why it remains an attractive target for smugglers.

But in this landscape of narrow ravines, fast creeks and rugged hills, the crossing remains difficult. On a recent afternoon, a cluster of about 30 refugees rested on a road outside the village’s mosque. Several had been beaten and robbed by the Bulgarian police, they said, including one man whose nose was broken. Another man was bitten by police dogs, they said.

Having failed to cross, they were wet and cold from wading the river on their forlorn journey back into Turkey.

“Police took our phones and our money,” said Ahmad Safi, who, like more than half of the refugees using this route at the moment, comes from Afghanistan.

Another Afghan man, wearing only a T-shirt on the cold day, said the police stole his coat, too.

Boryana Dzhambazova contributed reporting from Sofia, Bulgaria.

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A version of this article appears in print on , on Page A4 of the New York edition with the headline: A Feared Final Obstacle for Refugees. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe